Posts Tagged ‘the bloggess

The bloggess posted today about a meeting with her “shrink,” and the shrink’s desire for her to figure out what she wanted out of her life.

She replies to this, after a week of thought, with:

I’m not one of those people. I just do shit and then other shit happens. Sometimes it’s good shit and sometimes it’s shitty shit, but none of it is planned. And I sort of suspect that if I stopped to actually consider who I am, I’d stop being “me”. ”Me” never knows who I am. And now I sound like an existential Tarzan. Awesome.

It’s been eating at me for the last week, but I think I’ve finally figured it out. My five-year-plan is to never be the kind of person who’s stable enough to have a five-year-plan. It’s technically the same plan I had five years ago, and guess what? I’m totally on track.

Those of you who read her blog will recognize her particular sense of humor, and writing style, but this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and, as you know, quite intensely. You can read about my midlife crisis here, if you haven’t already.

I met with a good friend this morning, a woman a few years older than I am who has just started a new business in facilitation/leadership coaching/engagement consulting, and we brainstormed about my strengths, interests, personal and professional goals, etc. I have a few ideas, some suggested readings, and a model for designing a business plan.

I’m excited about this, and hope it leads to some clarification for me, and maybe a more focused path for the next/last twenty years of my professional life. I’m thinking these are all good things, and wondering if they are things I should have done twenty years ago, but never mind about that.

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about my “self” twenty years ago — what I thought I knew, what I thought I wanted, how I thought I’d get it or decided I didn’t deserve it. Part of this recent thinking is triggered by professional frustrations, but also because my sons are approaching the long-awaited Age of Independence, and I’m constantly trying to find the balance between being a “parent” and letting them figure it out for themselves. As I commented on the Bloggess’s post, my sons make me crazy sometimes because they’re so optimistic and I just think they’re being irresponsible because they don’t account for all of the possible things that might go wrong on the way to their poorly-thought out, not-that-ambitiously-pursued dreams. At the same time, I kick myself Every. Single. Day. for not being braver, and thinking of all the cool, kick-ass things I would have/could have/should have done when I was young and relatively free of responsibility if only I would not have been afraid. So clearly I’m not qualified to give them advice, or even a hard time — maybe they’re doing right all the stuff I did wrong.

She also posted this video. Amanda Palmer, “In My Mind.” Love the words, and although I’m not planning on getting any tattoos (maybe a little one?) or painting my eyebrows on quite like that, I find it to be very inspiring. I think I’m going to listen to this every morning for a while. UPDATE: I especially like the last stanza: And in my mind, I imagine so many things, things that aren’t really happening, and when they put me in the ground I’ll start pounding the lid, saying I haven’t finished yet, I still have a tattoo to get that says I’m living in the moment. And it’s funny how I imagined that I could win this winless fight, but maybe it isn’t all that funny that I’ve been fighting all my life, and maybe I have to think it’s funny if I want to live before I die, and maybe it’s funniest of all to think I’ll die before I actually see that I’m exactly the person that I want to be.

So my new five-year plan: look for open doors, and walk through them. Meanwhile, try to more thoroughly enjoy the room I’m in.

Anybody know something productive I can do with these, now that they’re naked?

Okay, never mind.

A friend suggested we make fermented lemons, which can be used in sauces, on pasta, etc., and sounded not only delicious but interesting in a science-experiment sort of way, so we quartered them, salted them, and mashed them in a glass cookie jar that I got when I was 18 and somehow managed to keep for 28 years without breaking. It broke. We threw the 6 lbs. of lemons and chunks of glass in the dumpster.

Despite my sadness over the loss of the lemons, and the cookie jar, I can’t help but be amused by the fact that the lemon on the right in the front row of the picture looks an awful lot like a nipple.

This observation makes me think maybe I should maybe stop reading the bloggess, although this and this are two of the funniest things I’ve ever read. This one was pretty funny, too, and I’m thinking really hard about what I can write on my bananas. “Clean your room,” while both timely AND apt, just doesn’t seem to cut it.

Which reminds me, in a related story, about leaving the house in the care of the 18-year old. So, I was off teaching at a music camp for three weeks, and my husband was home one or two nights a week, when he wasn’t up at camp with me and Only Daughter. (First Son doesn’t come home anymore — I just keep sending him Tshirts and sweaters that we find in closets and which he has forgotten he ever owns, and trying not to look at his bank balance since there will be a tuition bill in October that he can’t even BEGIN to cover and I’d like this to be hisproblem, notmine.) Since Second Son, for the three weeks I was gone and not forcing him to eat a meal with us (if he eats he has to do the dishes — this creates an intense mental cost/benefit analysis on a nightly basis, and fuhgeddaboudit if the entrée is fish), was basically living on cereal and the free food he could scarf at the-job-he-has-recently-been-let-go-from-for-no-apparent/good-reason (I’m assuming these two things are not related, hmmmmm. . .), Husband would occasionally lay in supplies like organic milk, Tide laundry soap (S.Son is a little OCD) and bananas. The bananas were apparently not getting eaten, as, upon our return, two of them had managed to ripen SO far, past when one has the olfactory and culinary fortitude necessary to pinch one’s nose to squeeze them out of the peel into a bowl to make banana bread with, that they had split their skins and begun to foam.

I think one of them actually said something to me as I scooped it up with a plastic bag, but I can’t be sure. It might have been the sound of me, lightly gagging.

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Oh, and I have yet to have any takers on the offer of a teenager for the low, low price of $545, and I found a similar pair of boots at Sundancecatalog.com for a little less, so I’m offering a $50 discount for any offers received in the next 24 hours.

Please disregard any disparaging thing I have ever written about either Son; they are a delight, the light of my world, and a comfort in my upcoming old age. Yours for only $495, I’ll even waive the handling charge.